Great, just great. She had been ready to move on. Ready to date and find someone and get her life out of aging student mentality into that of a woman ready to grow up and get real.

Then Linda showed up.

Marissa snapped the radio off. “She hauls your heart back into the open air and you feel more alive than you’ve felt in a year and yet you doubt everything you see and do and ever thought could be true.”

“You weren’t in love with her,” she told her reflection as she brushed her hair that night. “You were in love with how she made you feel. You’re in love with the endorphins and the sex and that ridiculous giddy feeling. She hurt you and you can’t go back to her like some addict.”

She scrubbed regenerating daily serum with UV repair into every last pore on her face. “She’s not in love with you. She’s just feeling the same thing. You make her feel good, that’s all it is.”

The sleeplessness and emotional turmoil of the previous nights seemed to catch up all at once and her ankle wasn’t the only reason she stumbled into bed.

During the night she woke once, heard the sound of the gentle tide hissing over warm sand. A new thought occurred to her. She smiled into her pillow and went back to sleep.

Her ankle was nearly normal-sized in the morning and she made time for a trip to the gym just to do something aerobic that didn’t involve her legs. Though the scale wasn’t exactly zooming in the right direction after the last weekend, she also wasn’t unduly worried she’d suddenly gain ten pounds during a few days where she focused elsewhere.

“How can I hate sweating and enjoy it at the same time?”

The woman at the next station, her tight dreads shining with perspiration, grinned knowingly. “Maybe you have two brains?”

“Yeah, one into cookies and sleeping until noon. The other into pain and thinking sunrise is the coolest time of day.” The other woman chuckled while Marissa was chortling inside. Having two brains was making a lot of sense at the moment. Love her, love her not. And it was still not the least bit fair that after her workout she felt more calm and more focused.

“Glad to see you moving a little faster today.” Heather handed over the mail.

Marissa leaned on the reception desk. “It’s better but it still aches a bit. You look tired.”

“I’m nervous about the therapist. Maybe I don’t want to know certain things.”

“You’re still going to go, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. I had this nightmare.” Heather’s appearance was as perfect as always, but her eyes were shadowed. “The kind where you wake up and it’s like the most obvious meaning in the world and you think why the heck you had to be asleep to even think it?”

“Okay.” Marissa wasn’t sure what Heather meant but she was listening.

“I dreamed that I was sitting in the therapist’s waiting area and there was a huge tray of Twinkies. I had one, then another and then I couldn’t stop eating them. I felt very embarrassed and people were staring—that feeling you get at Mickey D’s when you think everyone heard you order supersized fries and they’re all thinking ‘no wonder she’s fat,’ you know, even if you haven’t had fries in four months?”